I setup a VirtualBox VM with Wheezy and no DE. After install I apt-get'ed xdm/xorg/openbox and some miscellaneous apps like xfce-panel and thunar to make myself what is essentially a scaled-down homebrew DE. I setup my audio by apt-get'ing "alsa-base alsa-utils alsa-oss alsamixergui". SeaMonkey and non-free Flash are working fine, as are mplayer & smplayer for video.
Sometimes I have this problem where videos play very fast (maybe 4X or 6X speed) and there is no sound, which makes sense since sound at that speed would not be worth listening to anyways. If I use aplay in a terminal window to play a .wav file it shows the status line indicating that it is playing the file, but no noise is heard. If I open WinDates in wine and click "Test" on the configuration page for the notification noise, nothing is heard. Essentially all sound dies, and video is shown at high speed. I have found that a reboot will make the problem go away but it eventually returns. I was able to watch at least three or four hours of videos today before it died. In screwing around I tried a few things but when I tried
Code: Select all
sudo alsa force-reload
it actually made sound work again, and video played at normal speed. Unfortunately it killed SeaMonkey in the process (which meant I had to retype this post).
Anybody have any thoughts on how I might be able to reset ALSA without killing SeaMonkey or better yet, not having the problem happen in the first place? Perhaps an idea of what is actually happening?
S.